A nation of 'vidiots'?

A nation of 'vidiots'?

Jan. 25, 2001

'Smatter of Fact
By Katharhynn Heidelberg

It’s the age of litigation and we’ve all lost by default. The sentence? Court-ordered assumptions of stupidity for everyone!

Corporations must — as the Firestone Tires tragedies have demonstrated — be held responsible for their products. Unfortunately, our something-for-nothing mentality also forces them to guard against the irresponsible use of products or services by the terminally dimwitted.

In addition to increasing product costs to cover the often astronomical sums awarded by equally dim-witted juries in civil suits, companies must now gear their product warnings to the lowest common denominator.

I suppose I should be pleased that the post office tells me "do not wet" stamps that are self-adhesive. It is a comfort, too, to know that Junior’s Superman costume cape will not enable him to fly, and that, no matter how bad I want that Mountain Dew, I probably hadn’t better shove my hand down a cheetah’s gullet to get it, like the actors on a Superbowl commercial did.

I also rest easier because a certain automobile company features on its advertising the disclaimer, "do not attempt." I asked around, and discovered that, as suspected, most folks know better than to attack a group of marauding bears just because "it happened on T.V."

But the belief that television has lobotomized us to the point that we cannot be held responsible for our actions is gaining legal ground, this time, as an actual defense. Witness the terrible case involving Lionel Tate and Tiffany Eunick of Miami.

In 1999, Tate, then 12, allegedly caused the death of Eunick, 6. Tate, who is currently being tried as an adult, said he was imitating pro wrestlers on television. We might accept this, if he had jokingly picked Eunick up, and accidentally flung her, say, against some hard furniture.

Tate, however, is said to have "kicked and slugged" the little girl "repeatedly." It’s a little more difficult to accept this as an "accident," regardless of the program on television.

Tate’s defense attorney, Jim Lewis, is an even better player of the "let’s blame the T.V." game. He went so far as to allege that because of television, "Lionel didn’t understand that he could hurt the girl if he punched her and threw her, because he had seen pro wrestlers do that hundreds of times without injuring each other." (Quoted by the Associated Press. Italics added). Lewis also claims that Tate has the intelligence of an 8-year-old.

Permit me to be blunt: I do not care. I don’t care if Tate watched pro wrestling 24/7. I don’t care if he is behind his age group intellectually. (When I was 12, I referred to WWF as "Saturday night cartoons," and I was hardly a genius). The fact is, even an 8-year-old understands that hitting is wrong and that it hurts. Even an 8-year-old knows better than to pick on someone smaller than he is, and even an 8-year-old knows better than to throw a small child around.

Because the two children seem to have been "rough housing," I can accept that Tate probably never meant to kill Eunick, and so, sending a child like him to an adult prison for 25 years is probably inappropriate. But to argue that he didn’t understand that she could be hurt beggars belief. To claim that television rendered him incapable of knowing basic fact from basic fiction is fundamentally absurd. Or, rather like insisting we don’t know better than to stick our hands down a cheetah’s throat.

If it’s not the T.V.’s fault, though, whose is it? Are we simply a nation of idiots? Or could it be, regardless what is suggested to us in advertising, books, video games and movies, we ultimately bear responsibility for understanding what we watch and read?